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The world of gaming can be unpredictable. It can be hard to judge if a game is going to be the next Angry Birds and experience exponential, global growth. Riak is designed to help gaming platforms handle this uncertainty with ease. Its focus on high availability means that all data remains accessibility, even during node failure. Its flexible data model and redundant, fault-tolerant design easily allows gaming platforms to store any type of data needed. Riak is also built for operational simplicity at scale, so Riak will seamlessly grow with data and popularity. Finally, the option for multi-datacenter replication means that gamers all over the world will get the same low-latency experience across multiple devices.

Top Use Cases for Riak in Gaming

Player Data: Riak provides low-latency, highly available data storage for key player data, including user and profile information, game performance, statistics and rankings, and more. Riak also provides many different tools for querying and indexing this data, such as Riak Search, Secondary Indexing, and MapReduce.

Session Storage: Riak is frequently used to store and serve session data with predictable low-latency – necessary for game play. Riak imposes no restrictions on the type of content stored (since all objects are stored on disk as binaries), so session data can be encoded in many ways and can evolve without administrative changes to schemas.

Social Information: Riak provides flexible, robust storage for social data such as social graph information, player profiles and relationships, and social authentication tokens.

Global Data Locality: When gaming, players require a low-latency experience, regardless of where they’re physically located. Otherwise, interrupted or slow game play can lead to poor user experience and possible user abandonment. Riak Enterprise’s multi-datacenter capabilities allow game data to be physically close to players and serve them data no matter where they happen to be.

Riak in Production

Riak is already in production by many top gaming platforms. Here’s a look at a few that have switched to Riak.

Rovio
Rovio is the creator of the popular mobile game, Angry Birds. Since user growth can be hard to predict, they needed an infrastructure that could support unexpected viral growth without failing or causing downtime. They selected Riak due to its ease-of-scale and fault tolerance. Riak now powers their new cartoon series, Angry Birds Toons, and new mobile games. Learn more about why they moved to Riak in this case study and video from GDC.

Hibernum
Hibernum is a creator and developer of unique gaming experiences that combine the latest in social gaming, top quality visuals and animations, and cutting edge design. They switched from a relational database to Riak due to the high availability, ability to scale to peak loads, and predictable operational cost. Riak is used to store user game information for one of their most popular social games. Check out the complete case study, Hibernum Selects Riak for User Data Storage.

Kiip
Kiip is a platform for building rewards and achievements into your games. Kiip replaced MongoDB with Riak in order to achieve low read/write latencies and horizontal scalability. Kiip uses Riak for storing and serving session and device data. Learn more from the video on scaling Riak to 25MM Ops/Day.

Riot Games
Riot Games is the creator of League of Legends and faced some challenges with supporting millions of concurrent players at any given moment. They switched to Riak from MySQL for their next generation stats system, which tracks gameplay statistics and stores terabytes of data that gets aggregated and presented to players in near real-time. More information on how they use Riak and why they selected it can be found here.

Data Modeling in Riak

Riak has a “schemaless” design. Objects are comprised of key/value pairs, which are stored in flat namespaces called buckets. Here are some common approaches to structuring gaming data with Riak’s key/value design:

Data Type

Key

Value

Player Data

Login, Email, UUID

Player Attributes (often stored as a JSON document); Player Rewards and Stats

For gaming platforms and applications, Riak can be the ideal data solution. Its scalability allows for rapid growth of player data, the low-latency design allows for a fast and reliable experience for players all over the world, and its flexible data model means there are no restrictions on content type and no need to change the underlying schema.

To see if Riak is a fit for your gaming use case, we have put together a number of resources that showcase how Riak is solving gaming data challenges across multiple companies. Below are some highlights:

For a general overview of how Riak can be used for gaming companies, download our whitepaper, “Gaming on Riak.”

For Hibernum, a social gaming developer, we have a case study on how they’re using Riak to store user game information.

Rovio, the creators of Angry Birds, has a video that discusses how Riak supports their new mobile gaming platform.

Kiip, a mobile app rewards network, has a talk about their process of choosing Riak and their experience scaling it. They also go into more detail on their blog.

We have a few new pages on our site to help you start building retail, advertising, mobile, or gaming apps and services on Riak. On each of these pages, you will find industry use cases for Riak, relevant case studies from companies already using it in production, and information on Riak’s key/value model and querying features. Here’s a quick overview:

Riak provides low-latency, highly available storage to power gaming platforms and applications. Gaming companies use Riak to store player and game data, session and social information, and a variety of gaming content and events. This post offers a quick look at the advantages of Riak and some user case studies. Later this week, we’ll publish an in-depth look at the common gaming use cases and examples of data modeling.

Advantages of Riak

Support for Rapid Growth: Built for operational ease-of-use, Riak yields a near-linear performance and throughput increase as capacity is added.

Low-Latency Design: Riak is designed to store data and serve requests predictably and quickly, even during peak times.

Flexible, Reliable Storage: Riak has a flexible data model with redundancy built-in, and a number of mechanisms to maintain availability even in the event of node failure or network partition. Riak is content-agnostic, providing flexibility for document, image, video, and other storage.

Case Studies

Hibernum is a creator and developer of unique gaming experiences that combine the latest in social gaming, top quality visuals and animations, and cutting edge design. They switched from a relational database to Riak due to its high availability, ability to scale to peak loads, and predictable operational cost. Riak is used to store user game information for one of their most popular social games. For more information about how Hibernum uses Riak, check out the complete case study.

Kiip is a platform that lets brands provide rewards to mobile gamers for in-game achievements. Kiip replaced MongoDB with Riak in order to achieve low read/write latencies and horizontal scalability. Kiip uses Riak for session and device data. To learn more about Kiip’s experience selecting Riak, check out this video by two of their engineers.

I’m thrilled to announce that the v0.3 Riak Community Release Notes are now official. (For some history on the Community Release Notes, go here.) This installment covers what happened in the community from (approximately) May 4 through June 1. Some of the many stand-out accomplishments from this release:

We did a lot more. Take a few minutes to read up. Also, we’re already rolling with the 0.4 Release Notes (which will cover June 2 up through July 1). You’re encouraged to contribute to past, present, and future release notes, so don’t hold back.

Kiip has been using Riak in production for about three months, and Armon and Mitchell shared a lot of great information on their deployment: why they determined their initial, MongoDB-based system wouldn’t scale; their process for selecting Riak over various other database options; how, specifically, they are using Riak in production; what Riak isn’t suited for; some of the production issues they hit along the way; and much more.

The talk runs just over 30 minutes, and it’s well worth your time. Armon and Mitchell are smart, honest, articulate speakers who care deeply about the quality and long-term viability of the systems they put into production at Kiip. Also, if you like slides, they can be found here. Lastly, if you want to work with this team, Kiip is hiring.